The south Asian bombs

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

>I think the problem is the angle. I think that no person with the
slighte=
>st amount of common sense is applauding the latest fireworks of the
party=
> of Bombs Jabber and Poverty. But India is not alone. Other countries
lik=
>e France made the same mistake fairly recently. But what amazed me was
th=
>e almost total absence of any antinuclear protest, like we've seen in
Fra=
>nce. Such demonstrations can count as kind of a slight rehabilitation.
Bu=
>t they didn't happen in mother Bharat.

One cannot expect serious protest from the people of a country where
Bombs are seen as a way out of the incoherent political Jabber and the
crushing Poverty. It is like the paradox of renunciation - it is worth
something to renounce one's wealth, but to do so, one first has to be
rich. The poor man has nothing to renounce in the first place. So he
first has to acquire and only then can he think of renouncing. And when
the poor man tells the rich man to renounce, he faces a huge wall of
cynicism. Think of nuclear arsenals in the same way as wealth, and
India's past attempts at preaching disarmament as the poor man's advice
to the rich.

And protest or no, the calculating minds of any country's military
machine will do their tests. All the protests did not stop France from
conducting a test a day before putting its signature on a treaty. Why
hold the rulers of India (irrespective of their ideologies) to any
different standards?

>Gandhi must be turning and tossing=
> in his grave! I wonder if the popularity of the RAmAyana and Bhagavad
GI=
>tA are causing this blindness. The real battle of power is going on in
th=
>e field of economy and India (and Pakistan of course) are going down
here=
>=2E The battle on the nuclear field is over, since most politicians
under=
>stand that nobody can win a nuclear war and the possession of nuclear
wea=
>pens is very expensive and full of risks. =
>

True, but the same politicians also realize that it is only the one who
is willing to take the risks of possessing nuclear weapons who can hope
for some gain. And nuclear bombs or no, the economy would have its own
problems. The basic attitude is - why not face the economic problems
with some military might at one's disposal, instead of without? There is
also the other possibility that defence spending might kick-start the
economy, as it did for the USA, throughout the decades of the Cold War.

>Rama and Arjuna are no executives, but fighters who use mythical
nucleari=
>sh weaponry to defie the bad guys. Maybe many Indians see the atom bomb
j=
>ust as a new episode of one of their great epics. My suggestion would
be =
>therefore to look at the question: 'in what way and to what extend does
I=
>ndian mythology influence Indian economics and politics?' =

What the unlettered man thinks in a remote village is of no real concern
to the intellectuals in New Delhi. India's South Block and RAW can be as
cynical and calculating as USA's Pentagon and CIA. It is first and
foremost, contemporary politics, domestic and international. Old
mythology only comes in handy, for creating and manipulating public
opinion.

More than Rama and Arjuna who use external weapons, the mythology should
be one of Siva, with his third eye. One hopes he keeps the third eye
closed, but there can be no Siva without the potential to open the third
eye if necessary. The subcontinent's nuclear Siva has just winked.

Vidyasankar

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